Many kinds of test and measurement equipment and systems must be calibrated on a regular basis in order to assure measurement integrity. Many manufacturers stay ISO-9001 or ISO-9002 compliant and many defense and aerospace manufacturers have stringent in-house quality systems requiring traceability records to NIST standards. In order to stay compliant with any quality system, it is necessary to maintain and manage calibration of all electronic measurement equipment. In a production environment, calibration is often directly related to warranted product deliverables. Measurement data from equipment requiring calibration that is uncalibrated at the time of measurement is of little value and can be a significant liability if a product is measured on what was thought to be calibrated and then delivered before the uncalibrated status is discovered. Such an event results in a defective test. A defective test significantly increases production cost because it may require a notice to whom a product was delivered or recall and retest of the product. Accordingly, it is important to product manufacturers to maintain and manage a calibration process and schedule. As laboratories and manufacturing operations use more and more equipment that require calibration, the maintenance and management of the calibration becomes more complicated, and therefore costly, time consuming and prone to error.
One traditional method of maintaining and managing equipment calibration is through use of a calibration sticker as shown in FIG. 1 of the drawings with or without an automated tracking system. FIG. 1 of the drawings is a spectrum analyzer requiring periodic calibrations shown for purposes of illustration. The calibration sticker 103 indicates a date when a calibration was last performed and a date as to when a calibration is next due. The calibration sticker is typically placed in a visually prominent location on the face of the relevant equipment for a person to see in order to take steps to provide the next calibration. Entities that use an automated tracking system manually enter calibration information into a tracking program. The automated tracking system provides organization and calibration data management, but the manual data entry step adds time and cost to the calibration management process. Different types of equipment may have different calibration intervals. The same piece of equipment may have multiple calibration types all with different calibration schedules. In this case, there is a large amount of data that must be manually entered and maintained. Multiply these challenges by many pieces of equipment and the calibration management of a typical laboratory or manufacturing operation becomes significantly more complex, time consuming and costly.
Another challenge with respect to prior art calibration management using a calibration sticker is that the sticker does not typically include the type of calibration that was performed and does not record any history or traceability information relating to the calibration. When calibration traceability and history data are important, they are typically kept in a notebook or in the central tracking system. The update and maintenance procedure, therefore, requires manual update and organization of separate documents or a central database and retention of the data or documents separate from the equipment. The greater the amount of equipment needing calibration, the more complex, time consuming and error prone this process becomes. Additionally, there is a risk that the calibration data can get out of date or be lost altogether. In some cases, whether any single measurement equipment requires calibration is application dependent. Due to the limited amount of space on the front panel of measurement equipment, much of this information simply will not fit.
There is a need, therefore, for a method and apparatus for improved maintenance and management of equipment calibration, calibration requirements, and calibration data.